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Haptx has been working on its haptic gloves — which give you a sense of touch in virtual reality — for a few years. Today, the company is launching its Haptx Gloves Development Kit, an industrial-grade product for advanced simulation in virtual reality.

While the gloves have obvious applications in VR games, most of the interest so far is coming from industrial and enterprise markets. I used the gloves in a demo with the HTC Vive last week.

In the demo, I wore an HTC Vive headset and put on two gloves that were connected by thick wires to a big computer. The gloves were somewhat heavy on my hands, but they were lighter than they appeared to be, given their size. (I had to put sanitary finger gloves on each hand first.) Then I went into a demo featuring a barn and a farm landscape. I could touch the grains of wheat and feel how each rubbed against my fingers. I touched the clouds and felt rain droplets hit my open hand.

It was creepy when a spider crawled across my hand and I felt it. But it was cute when a fox and sheep did the same thing. Each time I touched something, I felt touch feedback through the gloves. It was surreal. (It was my second time wearing the gloves, as the first time I tried it with only one. This time, the feeling was more fine-grained in terms of sensations.)

Above: Dean Takahashi looks at a spider on his hand, in VR.

Image Credit: Dean Takahashi

“With Haptx Gloves, leading automotive and aerospace companies can touch and interact with their vehicles before they are built, radically reducing time and cost for design iterations,” said Haptx founder and CEO Jake Rubin, in an interview with GamesBeat. “Industrial and government organizations can deploy virtual training solutions that build real muscle memory, providing a safe, cost-effective, and flexible alternative to live training.”

The kit includes two gloves, each featuring 130 tactile actuators, or little pressure-sensitive motors, that provide realistic touch feedback across the hand and fingertips.

They are built with Haptx’s patented microfluidic technology, which pumps fluid through wires to provide the feedback. Haptx Gloves can deliver powerful force feedback and motion tracking with sub-millimeter precision.

“The Haptx Gloves Development Kit provides a new level of haptic fidelity and realism,” said Mary Hamilton, managing director and lead of the Digital Experiences R&D group at Accenture Labs, in a statement. “Accenture is looking forward to seeing how Haptx Gloves will enhance the capabilities of VR for human-machine interaction.”

The company Dream is named appropriately. For three years, it has been working on an online collaboration tool that enables people to view web sites on the Chrome browser in virtual reality. It’s like the operating system for virtual reality, and it is available for free on the Oculus Store.

That might seem a bit crazy, but the company is launching a test version of it today. I’ve tried it out, and with the exception of the occasional bug, it works pretty much as intended. I was able to look at and read VentureBeat web posts online, talk with the company founder, and enjoy a nice landscape — all inside VR.

Idan Beck, CEO of San Francisco-based Dream, said in an interview with VentureBeat that the team decided to code Dream from scratch as an open software project. With it, you can do things like present to your team via an Adobe PDF document or Google Doc.

“We were looking at the promise of VR as the next paradigm shift in computing,” Beck said. “What does software look like? What does an operating system look like? How do you use a browser? The idea is you can wear a headset and interact with all the people you know in VR. We believe that productivity is a good use case for VR.”

While other companies thought about games and entertainment, Beck thought about productivity and other software, how something like an operating system in VR should look. The company built its own engine.

Both Beck and his cofounder have created and sold startups before, and Beck did his own share of mentoring. In 2016, Dream gathered $1.3 million in funding and assembled a small team of just four people.

As I wore the Oculus Rift headset and reached out to tap something, Beck said, “Even a button is an unsolved problem in VR. You are trying to get an exact interaction with an object. A lot of these things have not been explored.”

With Dream, you can create a user account in VR. A virtual keyboard appears and you use your pointed forefingers to type on the keys on the keyboard. You can also create your own virtual character, or avatar, in VR. Beck figures you can type at 30 words to 40 words a minute.

Above: You can view videos in Dream in VR.

Image Credit: Dream

“You don’t have to take off your headset for anything,” Beck said. “If you try to do productivity in VR, you’ll find so many of the pieces are not there. Like real-time networking.”

You can fire up Chrome as a browser, and you can use it to view PowerPoint presentations on web pages or view items in Dropbox or Google Drive. That enables you to hold meetings with colleagues in VR.

Sure, some people might get sick in VR, or they might get tired after a short time. But Beck has noticed that people can meet for more than an hour inside Dream.

“As the world becomes a more remote place, there is a movement toward more communications,”